'He's still with us':
In his palace in Baghdad, increasingly isolated from the rest of the world as war looms, Saddam Hussein is said to seek inspiration on his bookcase -- from the many volumes he treasures that contain the writing of another infamous mustached dictator.Well, Galina, it's a tossup between vodka and the voices in his head.
Joseph Stalin, the legend goes, is one of the few people Mr. Hussein looks up to. He sees his own story as linked to the former Soviet leader's -- Stalin survived famine and war and accusations that he was killing his own people to remain in power until the day he died.
Half a world away in North Korea, as the sabre-rattling Kim Jong Il pushes his country toward a confrontation with the West, the Dear Leader basks in the constant adulation of his citizens -- a cult of personality consciously built on the Stalinist model. He has gone much further in his hero worship than erecting a few statues; since assuming power in 1994, Mr. Kim has imitated everything from Stalin's labour camps to his penchant for nuclear brinkmanship.
It's perhaps no surprise that Mr. Kim, famously linked to Mr. Hussein in George W. Bush's "axis of evil," looks up to Stalin. His father was installed by Moscow in 1945.
In her two-room Moscow apartment, 85-year-old Galina Ionova hugs a book praising the man she says saved the Motherland, and explains why she thinks that Stalin is still having an impact five decades after his death.
"Stalin was a genius. None of us common people can understand what he was guided by," the retired history professor says, eyes glowing with an almost religious fervour.
